28 Feb
2023
28 Feb
'23
4:24 p.m.
Looks like my trusty old HP Microserver has come out in sympathy for Andy’s :)
Unfortunately, it’s running my personal Mastodon instance.
I’m thinking of hosting it with BitFolk instead of at home. I’m the only user at the
moment and I don’t envisage having more than another 2 or 3 users. I’m not connected to
any relays as I can’t cope with massive timelines and things are going quite nicely as it
is.
Does 2GiB RAM sound reasonable as a start? My HP has 8GB and is running other things as
well but I rarely see memory usage go above 1.5GB. I’m using AWS (S3 plus Cloudfront) for
the media cache (just for fun and because it’s less than £1 a month) so probably OK with
10-15GiB storage.
Anybody already doing this, either here or with another provider? I did spin up an Amazon
Lightsail instance just to see what life is like elsewhere and wasn’t that impressed - it
uses Cloud-Config which I find a pain in the backside.
Cheers,
Mike
28 Feb
28 Feb
10:54 p.m.
Mike Zanker said:
Looks like my trusty old HP Microserver has come out in sympathy for Andy’s
:) Unfortunately, it’s running my personal Mastodon
instance.
I’m thinking of hosting it with BitFolk instead of at home.
As the instance I was on disappeared - I wouldn't want to have users for
this either - I have been pondering what running
https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma would be like.
Ian
11:59 p.m.
On 28/02/2023 16:24, Mike Zanker via BitFolk Users wrote:
Looks like my trusty old HP Microserver has come out
in sympathy for Andy’s :) Unfortunately, it’s running my personal Mastodon instance.
I’m thinking of hosting it with BitFolk instead of at home. I’m the only user at the
moment and I don’t envisage having more than another 2 or 3 users. I’m not connected to
any relays as I can’t cope with massive timelines and things are going quite nicely as it
is.
Does 2GiB RAM sound reasonable as a start? My HP has 8GB and is running other things as
well but I rarely see memory usage go above 1.5GB. I’m using AWS (S3 plus Cloudfront) for
the media cache (just for fun and because it’s less than £1 a month) so probably OK with
10-15GiB storage.
Anybody already doing this, either here or with another provider? I did spin up an Amazon
Lightsail instance just to see what life is like elsewhere and wasn’t that impressed - it
uses Cloud-Config which I find a pain in the backside.
Cheers,
Mike
I can't comment on the Mastodon bit, but I'd missed Andy's HP
Microserver problems. One of mine went a little while back and I'm
currently trying to decide whether to fix it or not - looks to just be
the PSU, but it is getting a bit old and they don't fit with my usual
off the shelf for everything ethos so I can just grab a replacement or
upgrade part easily. Then again I could probably sell it and make back
more than the cost of the PSU if I want to later.
--
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | https://www.aptanet.com/ | 023 9238 0001
=============================================================================
Registered in England | Company No: 4905028 | Registered Office: Ralls House,
Parklands Business Park, Forrest Road, Denmead, Waterlooville, Hants, PO7 6XP
1 Mar
1 Mar
2:45 p.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
Hello,
On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 11:59:48PM +0000, Paul Tansom via BitFolk Users wrote:
I'd missed Andy's HP Microserver problems.
https://social.bitfolk.com/@grifferz/109933295736662507
When I got home I cleaned it out with an air duster and the fan
noise stopped, so I'm going to go back to ignoring the question of
what to replace it with. 😀
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
5:59 p.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
On 2023-03-01 14:45+0000, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users wrote:
https://social.bitfolk.com/@grifferz/109933295736662507
When I got home I cleaned it out with an air duster and the fan
noise stopped, so I'm going to go back to ignoring the question of
what to replace it with. 😀
Have you/anyone else seen Microserver cashback recently like HP did a
few years ago? I got a N54L+iLO when they did that and I really liked
it. A few months back I found the cache of screws on the inside door
that somehow were hidden from me. Happy days.
Ed
2 Mar
2 Mar
11:33 a.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
On Wed, Mar 01, 2023 at 05:59:00PM +0000, Ed Neville via BitFolk Users wrote:
Have you/anyone else seen Microserver cashback
recently like HP did a
few years ago?
It's been many years since HP did good deals on these and also the
last revision or two were a lot worse spec than in the heyday of
Microservers. There's nothing comparable now from HP/Lenovo nor any
indication that there will be, sadly.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
11:47 a.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 at 11:33, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users <
users(a)mailman.bitfolk.com> wrote:
It's been many years since HP did good deals on
these and also the
last revision or two were a lot worse spec than in the heyday of
Microservers. There's nothing comparable now from HP/Lenovo nor any
indication that there will be, sadly.
Indeed. I stopped buying them new long ago, when they started putting
firmware updates behind a paywall.
I did pick up an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a "Intel(R) Celeron(R)
CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz" CPU and 16GB RAM from eBay a while back as a general
purpose home server. It's perhaps unsurprisingly way better / faster than
the old N40/N54 Microservers of yore.
That said (and getting back nearer the topic) I did run a mastodon instance
on one of the old N54L's for a bit last year. It was just about man for the
job, but only for a single user, I don't think it would have coped with a
bunch of users, and certainly wouldn't have been able to run elastic search.
I moved the instance (https://ubuntu.social) to a chunky VPS where it runs
fine. I'll probably retire the old Microservers, as I have no real use for
them at the moment.
Cheers,
Al.
12:55 p.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
Hello,
On Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 11:47:45AM +0000, Alan Pope via BitFolk Users wrote:
I did pick up an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a
"Intel(R) Celeron(R)
CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz" CPU and 16GB RAM from eBay a while back as a general
purpose home server. It's perhaps unsurprisingly way better / faster than
the old N40/N54 Microservers of yore.
Mine is an N36L with an AMD Athlon II Neo at max 1.3GHz!
Anything with a better CPU would be an improvement. I have a disk
chassis attached by eSATA that I'd like to keep using though, so any
replacement either has to have eSATA (rare) or a PCIe slot for an
eSATA card.
So requirements are:
- Cheap
- Fairly low power
- Fairly quiet (quiet fan is okay)
- Room for a low profile PCIe card
- At least 16G RAM
- At least two mass storage slots, which can be 2.5" SATA, 3.5"
SATA, NVMe, or a mixture. Not USB or SD card or the like.
Nice to have:
- Storage slots to be hot swappable
So if anyone has any tips for good deals at the moment I'd be
interested.
By the way this machine's four internal HDDs first had Debian 3.0
woody installed on it in 2004. It has been constantly upgraded in
place since then, and seen several different entirely new iterations
of hardware around it. It's now Debian 10 buster. But it no longer
makes sense to run it off of 4 SATA HDDs so probably its next
incarnation will be on two SSDs, which may benefit from a complete
new install.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
8 Mar
8 Mar
3:17 p.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
On Thu, 2 Mar 2023, at 12:55 PM, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users wrote:
Mine is an N36L with an AMD Athlon II Neo at max
1.3GHz!
Likewise, but was coping with a single-user Mastodon instance quite nicely. I've now
migrated that instance to a new BitFolk server (2GiB RAM, 15GiB SSD) and it is rather
faster :) RAM usage seems to have settled, too, so maybe the Sidekiq memory leak has been
fixed.
Cheers,
Mike
7:51 p.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
On 02/03/2023 11:47, Alan Pope via BitFolk Users wrote:
I did pick up an HP ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 with a
"Intel(R)
Celeron(R) CPU G1610T @ 2.30GHz" CPU and 16GB RAM from eBay a while back
as a general purpose home server. It's perhaps unsurprisingly way better
/ faster than the old N40/N54 Microservers of yore.
I've got one of those. I think it was about £100 after cashback, but it
only has 8GB of RAM.
I just powered it up yesterday. It seems to have two 4TB HDDs as well as
a 225GB boot drive. I had mostly forgotten about it. This discussion
prompted me to try it out again. There were lots of apt upgrades.
--
Iain
10 Mar
10 Mar
6:04 a.m.
New subject: HP Microservers (was Re: Re: Hosting Mastodon)
Great discussion :)
I have one of these old faithfuls too. It chugs along in the server room
(read garage) faithfully everyday. Even coping with frequent power outages
we have here daily in South Africa.
It handles all our backups and a bunch of hobby projects and just keeps
going.
But one day it will not...
Question, what on earth do replace this with?
Brendan
1 Mar
1 Mar
12:11 a.m.
I'm hosting two single-user instances of Mastodon on my multi-purpose Bitfolk VPS.
I haven't noticed any resource issues, despite running
mastodon-{web,sidekiq,streaming} twice.
I have nginx serving a media cache of 1Gi, with the actual media in Google's
S3-equivalent storage, which is steadily growing at about 10Gi/month, which adds an extra
couple of pence
every billing period. Last month's bill was £0.87.
You don't necessarily need cloud-backed storage: new Mastodon has decent tooling to
delete
old media, but I chose to so that I would never have to think too hard about disk space.
I picked Google over AWS as they have a reassuring "delete everything" button
that AWS seems to lack.
Douglas
6:04 a.m.
On Wed, 1 Mar 2023, at 12:11 AM, Douglas Gardner via BitFolk Users wrote:
I'm hosting two single-user instances of Mastodon
on my multi-purpose
Bitfolk VPS.
I haven't noticed any resource issues, despite running
mastodon-{web,sidekiq,streaming} twice.
Thanks - how much RAM do you have?
You don't necessarily need cloud-backed storage:
new Mastodon has
decent tooling to delete old media, but I chose to so that I would never have to think
too
hard about disk space.
Same here - and easier to move hardware if necessary without having to rsync many GB of
cache. Also I just like playing with these things :)
I picked Google over AWS as they have a reassuring
"delete everything"
button that AWS seems to lack.
It is possible to do this with AWS but I can't remember the procedure off the top of
my head.
Mike
1:33 p.m.
On Tue 28 Feb 2023 16:24:28 GMT, Mike Zanker via BitFolk Users wrote:
Looks like my trusty old HP Microserver has come out
in sympathy for
Andy’s :) Unfortunately, it’s running my personal Mastodon instance.
I’m thinking of hosting it with BitFolk instead of at home. I’m the
only user at the moment and I don’t envisage having more than another
2 or 3 users. I’m not connected to any relays as I can’t cope with
massive timelines and things are going quite nicely as it is.
Does 2GiB RAM sound reasonable as a start? My HP has 8GB and is
running other things as well but I rarely see memory usage go above
1.5GB. I’m using AWS (S3 plus Cloudfront) for the media cache (just
for fun and because it’s less than £1 a month) so probably OK with
10-15GiB storage.
Anybody already doing this, either here or with another provider? I
did spin up an Amazon Lightsail instance just to see what life is like
elsewhere and wasn’t that impressed - it uses Cloud-Config which I
find a pain in the backside.
Cheers,
Mike
I have a test instance which hosts three accounts, mastodon seems to use
a bit more than 1 GB of RAM. The secret is to have a cron that restarts
sidekiq, because it leaks a lot.
--
Alarig
4:26 p.m.
Hi,
On 01/03/2023 13:33, Alarig Le Lay via BitFolk Users wrote:
[snip]
I have a test instance which hosts three accounts, mastodon seems to use
a bit more than 1 GB of RAM. The secret is to have a cron that restarts
sidekiq, because it leaks a lot.
Aha, thanks for the tip! So far I haven't hit any limits with my
single-user Mastodon instance (I'm boring enough not to be boosted a
million times... ;-) , but this would be a good tweak to implement right
away.
Cheers,
Jan
412
days inactive
422
days old
14 comments
11 participants
participants (11)
-
Alan Pope -
Alarig Le Lay -
Andy Smith -
Brendan -
Douglas Gardner -
Ed Neville -
Iain Harrison -
Ian -
Jan Henkins -
Mike Zanker -
Paul Tansom